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Posts Tagged ‘ Video ’

Stream Your Music and Video Anywhere You Go

By Fei on September 15, 2010

By Rick Broida
September 15, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Like many people, I have more music and videos than can possibly fit on my iPhone. What am I supposed to do? Delete all my episodes of “Firefly” to make room for “Flight of the Conchords”? Am I supposed to not listen to Brendan Benson because he can’t fit alongside my Green Day library?

ZumoCast to the rescue! This free service turns your PC into a kind of media server, able to stream music, video, and even files to any other PC–or even your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. (Android support is coming soon.) And it more or less eliminates the problem of limited local storage space.

After installing the ZumoCast client on your PC (it’s available for Macs as well) and creating an account, just choose the items you want to make available: documents, photos, music, and/or video. By default the software pulls from your eponymous Windows folders, but you can just as easily add any other folders you want.

And that’s it! As long as you leave that PC running, you’ll be able to access that media elsewhere. Suppose, for example, your workplace won’t allow you to store music on your office PC. No problem: Just sign into your ZumoCast account in your Web browser, click the Music tab, then queue up the songs you want to hear.

Likewise, with the free ZumoCast apps for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad, you can tap your libraries on the go. If this sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the Simplify Media app I wrote about last year. However, that was limited to music, and it’s no longer available, having been acquired (and discontinued, at least temporarily) by Google earlier this year. ZumoCast is a very worthy successor.

I particularly like the app’s Download option, which transfers selected files to your device. That’s awesome if, say, you’re about to board an airplane, and want to watch or listen to something even when there’s no connectivity.

ZumoCast is perfect for storage-strapped devices, or simply for a PC that doesn’t have all the media housed on your other PC. This is without question one of my favorite freebies of the year.

Download YouTube videos for offline viewing

By Fei on June 24, 2010

By Rick Broida
June 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Ever wish you could watch that piano-playing cat at 35,000 feet? Alas, YouTube requires a live Internet connection, and Wi-Fi is still pretty hard to find in the friendly skies.

Fortunately, you can download YouTube videos to your PC for anytime, anywhere viewing, no Internet required.

There are countless ways to “rip” YouTube vids, but I’m partial to Keep Tube. It’s available as both a Firefox extension and a browser bookmarklet, the latter compatible with Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.
What’s more, Keep Tube works with not only YouTube, but also CollegeHumor, Facebook, Google Video, Metacafe, and countless other sites.
When you see a video you like, just click the Keep Tube icon (in Firefox) or bookmarklet. From there you’ll land at a Keep Tube page where you can download your video in one or more formats and sizes.

My advice: choose MP4 whenever possible, and always at the highest available resolution. YouTube’s native FLV format requires a special player, whereas MP4 works in Divx, QuickTime, and other more-common players.

Also, MP4 files usually play nicely on smartphones, so you can take your saved videos to go.

Stream audio and video to an iPad

By Fei on April 27, 2010

By Kirk McElhearn
April 27, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – While the iPad is a great device for listening to music or watching movies and TV shows, one feature that it’s missing is the ability to stream music and video to it from an iTunes library on your computer.

With Apple’s AirTunes feature, you can stream music from one library to certain devices, and you can also share an iTunes library on your local network to be able to listen to music or play video from it.

But Apple left this functionality out of the iPad, treating it more like a mobile device than the replacement for a laptop that it will become in many homes. Given that the iPad doesn’t have a great deal of capacity–especially in the 16GB entry-level models–the ability to stream could come in handy. You may want to stream music to listen to while you’re reading a book, without having to worry exactly what music you last added from your plentiful iTunes library to the iPad. Or you may want to watch a movie stored on your Mac. As the saying goes, there’s an app for that–more than one, actually, although they’re far from perfect.

For starters, there’s what you might called “passive” streaming of music from an iTunes library to the iPad. You can use Rogue Amoeba’s $25 Airfoil ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), the latest version of which I discussed in a recent article, in conjunction with the company’s free Airfoil Speakers app (while not yet optimized for the iPad, you can run it in a small window or pixel-doubled mode). You’re limited, though, to streaming from the iTunes library on a computer, and can’t choose what to listen to from the iPad. So while this is a good idea if you just want to use the iPad as, say, a speaker when you’re listening to music in the kitchen, it’s a bit limited for serious usage.

But streaming both music and video is clearly something that interests developers. Two $3 iPad apps provide this functionality, in similar fashion, by creating a local server on a computer (Mac or Windows) and an app on the iPad to play the music or video: Matthew Gallagher’s StreamToMe and InMethod’s Air Video (there’s also an Air Video Free version that limits the number of displayed items in each folder). Both originated on the iPhone and iPod touch and have been updated as universal iPhone OS apps.

Both apps require free companion applications that you need to download from the developers’ Websites and install on your computer. You can share your entire hard drive, just your Music and Movies folders, or a specific folder of your choosing–the last option ideal, for example, to set up a limited selection of videos for a child who’s going to be watching on the iPad.

With StreamToMe, you download the ServeToMe application, launch it, choose which folders to share, then just leave it running. On the iPad, you open the StreamToMe app, tap the name of the computer you’re sharing with, then navigate through its folders to find the content you want to stream.

StreamToMe is good for video–though it can’t stream protected video files from the iTunes Store–but not so much for music. You can’t choose playlists, and you can’t even play the contents of a folder. If you play one song, the program stops afterwards and awaits your next selection. However, as far as videos are concerned, it plays all the main video formats (including some that iTunes can’t): MP4, AVI, MOV, FLV, MPG, MKV, and WMV. For music, it plays MP3s, unprotected AACs, and FLAC files.

Air Video uses a program called Air Video Server, which only works for videos. Like ServeToMe, it lets you choose shared folders, but also lets you add iTunes playlists, though this feature is buggy. Air Video supports MP4, M4V, MOV, AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, MPEG, MKV, 3GP, DMF, DIVX, and FLV formats (and, like StreamToMe, doesn’t play protected iTunes Store videos). It does, however, offer some interesting features, such as on-the-fly conversion on your computer so the iPad doesn’t have to do so much work, and individual settings for quality, resolution, and zoom for each video.

While none of these options mentioned are perfect, each of them has its advantages. I’d still like to see Apple provide a way to tap into my iTunes library, especially for listening to music while I read, but the ability of StreamToMe and Air Video to work with formats that Apple doesn’t support make them compelling choices for those who want to watch videos on their iPads.

Electrowetting Brings Color, Video to E-book Reader Screens

By Fei on April 26, 2010

By Alessondra Springmann
April 26, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Do you love the gorgeous color and video on your laptop’s LCD, but find the long battery life of e-ink displays tempting? Dutch display company Liquavista might have the solution for you. By using a process called “electrowetting,” Liquavista has created high efficiency displays that not only show text and still photos in color, but can also animate videos.

What differentiates electrowetting from a traditional e-ink display, like the one on your Kindle or Nook? E-ink uses an electric field to move pigment particles in order to make text and images, while Liquavista’s electrowetting process uses electric charge to move colored oil drops to change a display’s color or to play a video. Because of the high switching speed of electrowetting, this microfluidic phenomenon is perfect for applications that require little power draw, like e-book readers or smartphones.
Some of the advantages of electrowetting over LCDs include that electrowetting draws less voltage and power than a traditional LCD. Displays using electrowetting can also be thinner than their LCD counterparts, as well as up to eight times brighter because of the lack of polarizers required for the electrowetting technology displays.

While there aren’t yet any consumer devices available in the US offering colored e-ink displays that use high speed switching of colored oils, it’s been possible to get video on the Kindle and other e-book readers for a while (link).

YouTube Makeover Designed To Keep You Watching

By Fei on April 2, 2010

By Jeff Bertolucci
April 2, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Two months after entering beta, YouTube‘s video page redesign is ready for its close up. Google’s video-sharing site first unveiled the makeover in late January, and today the streamlined interface goes live to all users.
The new look comes after a year of planning, and serves two purposes. First, it provides a cleaner UI that’s “more subdued, stripped down and simple than before,” according to a January blog post by Yahoo designer Julian Frumar and software engineer Igor Kofman. Second, it’s designed to improve the site’s stickiness by getting visitors to watch more videos and (hopefully) never leave.
The revamped video page is structured to appeal to power users and novices alike. At first glance, the changes are subtle, but longtime YouTubers will spot the changes right off.

Additional information about the clip you’re watching has been consolidated in one place–underneath the video window. To see more details about the video, you click an arrow to the right of the description snippet, or in the “views” box.

Better Search Integration

The “next up” video list on the right side of the screen is now smarter, in that it takes into consideration how you arrived at the site. If you reached the video via search query, for instance, the suggestions list shows the other search results. If you arrived via a playlist or recommendation, however, the list displays other playlist or recommendation suggestions.

In addition, you can now conduct a search while watching a video–a boon for multitaskers. Results appear on the right side of the page and won’t interrupt the video.

New Ratings

Gone is the old 5-star rating system. Google says that most people used either a “1″ or a “5″ to rate a video–a love-it-or-hate-it scenario–so the new rating system reflects that by featuring only two buttons: “Like” and “Don’t Like.” Click “Like,” and YouTube adds the video to your favorites list.

The “subscribe” button is easier to find now: Above the video right near the title. This change makes it easier to take a quick peek at other videos from the creator’s channel.

Create Cool Videos without Pricey Software

By Fei on March 24, 2010

By Rick Broida
March 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Want to create a custom video, the kind with photos, video clips, and music? Normally, it’s a time-consuming and/or expensive hassle.

You can use Microsoft’s Windows Live Movie Maker free of charge, but it’s pretty limited–and kind of a pain in the neck, in my humble opinion.

You could also spend upwards of $100 on a movie-editing package like Adobe Premiere Elements of Pinnacle Studio. But those are big, complex apps–and like Movie Maker, they have to be installed. Surely there must be some kind of cloud-based solution?

There is, and it’s called Animoto. This cool service makes moviemaking embarrassingly quick and easy, and the results look like something that took days or weeks to create in a commercial movie-editing program.

It’s a three-step process. First, you upload your photos and/or videos. If your stuff’s already online somewhere else, no problem: Animoto can pull media from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and other sites.

Second, choose your music. You can upload a favorite MP3 or choose a track from Animoto’s extensive (but mostly indie) library.

Finally, select a pace for your video: normal, half speed, or 2x speed. With that done, Animoto goes to work, assembling everything into a seriously slick music videos, complete with titles, transitions, and special effects. Don’t like the finished product? You can make changes manually or just let Animoto have another whack at it–it’ll generate different results every time.

When you’re satisfied with the results, you can share the video via the usual methods (Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc.), or download it for your own use.

I like Animoto’s pricing options a lot. You can test-drive the service for free, but that limits you to a 30-second movie. If you want a full-length flick, you can buy that for just $3. Or, if you see yourself using Animoto a lot, $30 buys you a one-year membership (with all the videos you care to make).

Whether you’re looking to have a little video fun or produce something meaningful for a special occasion, Animoto takes virtually all the hassles out of traditional movie editing.

YouTube Offers Auto-Captioning to All Users

By Fei on March 8, 2010

By Jeff Bertolucci
March 8, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – YouTube is opening up its auto-caption feature to everybody, a move that benefits not only deaf users, but also people who watch videos in really noisy places, like airport terminals. And since the tool will be able to translate captions into your choice of 50 languages, it should be handy for viewing YouTube clips from around the world. (For now, however, auto-captioning works only with videos in English.)

Auto-captioning borrows some text-to-speech algorithms from Google Voice Search to automatically create captions upon viewer request. As you’d expect from machine-generated captioning, the results aren’t perfect, but they’re fairly accurate for formal presentations and keynote-type speeches with minimal background noise. In other words, auto-captioning gives you a pretty good idea of what’s being said, although some of the finer points may be misleading or just plain wrong. On the plus side, a video owner can download the auto-captions, clean them up, and upload a corrected transcript.

The iPad Keynote Test

To test auto-captioning, I went to YouTube to watch Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation from January 2010. The feature is a cinch to activate via the “up arrow” button on the bottom right of the video window.

Within seconds, YouTube begins generating captions, which it displays in real-time.

Auto-captioning was reasonably accurate, albeit with a few glitches:

· Steve: And you can change the background screen, the home screen, to personalize it any way you want.

· YouTube: and you cannot change the background screen the whole screen that personalize it anyway you want

· Steve: You can browse the Web with it

· YouTube: you can browse the went with it

· Steve: A keyboard pops up. It’s almost life-size.

· YouTube: a keyboard pops up it’s almost like flies

YouTube first released auto-captioning to a small group of beta testers in November. The wide availability of this tool will certainly benefit content owners, who can easily and quickly make their videos accessible to a worldwide audience.

Then again, a poorly translated video could lead to some troubling international incidents. What do you think?

Enjoy online video offline

By Fei on February 25, 2010

By Cliff Joseph
February 25, 2010

LONDON – It’s not all clips of burping babies and snoozing grannies: YouTube offers some real gems, too. There are thousands of music videos and some great live performances, for example, plus plenty of sports clips to browse through. Increasingly, film and TV companies are also making films and TV series available on the site.

YouTube streams video within your web browser, which means clips play automatically. But this also means you lose the clip as soon as you close your browser and have to wait for it to stream again before you can watch it a second time. You’ll need to be online, too.

If only you could download video clips and store them permanently on your PC’s hard disk, letting you watch your favourite clips offline whenever you want. It would be even better if you could convert the resulting file into a format compatible with your iPod, mobile phone or other portable device of choice.

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Fortunately, a number of programs enable you to download video from the web. You’ll need a second piece of software to convert YouTube clips formatted as Flash video files, however – these aren’t natively supported in Windows Media Player. Alternatively, get a program that can play back Flash video.

Many free and paid-for programs can handle one of these tasks; RealPlayer, our favourite, does all three. The basic version of the program is free for download from real.com/realplayer.

Over the following pages, we’ll demonstrate how to download your favourite YouTube clips to your computer and enjoy them offline using RealPlayer.

We’ll also show you how to convert video to a format compatible with your MP3 player, portable video player, smartphone or PC.

Download web video using RealPlayer

Step 1. Download RealPlayer SP. It’s compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google’s Chrome browser, and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, so you should be able to use it without changing your existing computer setup.

Step 2. Follow the RealPlayer installation wizard and agree to the default settings. Be sure to select the option marked ‘Enable browser download button’ in the ‘Download and Recording’ section of the dialog box. This option will be necessary for directly downloading video from web pages.

Step 3. The free version of RealPlayer is ad-supported. Click No to all offers punted to you, then choose the ‘Basic RealPlayer’ installation. A RealPlayer Message Center will be installed in the Taskbar; you can turn this off by right-clicking the icon in the Taskbar, selecting ‘Preferences’ and deselecting everything.

Step 4. After watching the Australian Open, we found some great clips of Roger Federer on YouTube. When you open a page that has a video you’ll see the RealPlayer download button appear just above the clip. Click this button to download the video, or right-click the clip and choose the relevant option.

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Step 5. The RealPlayer Downloader window appears, showing the clip you’re currently downloading. A number of useful options are available in this window, including Convert to and Copy to. For now, just click the thumbnail preview of the video to open it and play it back using RealPlayer.

Step 6. The clip has now been downloaded to your hard drive in the Flash video (.flv) format. Flash isn’t compatible with Windows Media Player, so you’ll either need to convert the file or watch it in RealPlayer. RealPlayer can also be used to download Flash video from other websites, such as DailyMotion and Vimeo.

Step 7. Next to the RealPlayer download button that appears in YouTube is a small triangular button that displays a drop-down menu. You can use the ‘Save this video as’ command offered here to change the name of the video file when you save it on to your hard drive.

Step 8. Choose the Preferences option in this drop-down list to visit the Preferences panel in the main program. Under ‘Downloading & Recording’, you can change various settings such as the folder where clips should be saved. You can also alter the behaviour of the download button or switch it off altogether.

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Step 9. Choose Advanced Settings. If you want to play your video clips on a portable device, you’ll need to convert – or ‘transcode’ – the original .flv file into a compatible format. RealPlayer’s default transcoding option is Best Performance. This is fast, but the resulting video quality can be poor. We’ve instead selected Highest Detail.

Step 10. We’re now ready to convert our clip for use on an iPod. The Downloader window offers ‘Convert to’ and ‘Copy to’ options. Copy to is the quickest, converting the file and automatically preparing it for transfer. By default RealPlayer is set to copy to an iPod, but you can select another device from the drop-down menu.

Step 11. RealPlayer also lets you download a batch of clips and convert them simultaneously using the ‘Convert All’ button. Other handy options include the ability to send video directly from the Downloader to your Facebook profile, or send a link to the YouTube page via email or Twitter.

Step 12. We selected the ‘Copy to Apple iPod’ option. RealPlayer downloaded our batch of Roger Federer clips and converted them into the H.264 format. It then added the converted files to our iTunes Library, ready to be transferred to an iPod. Plug in the iPod and tell iTunes to synchronise the files.

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Step 13. The ‘Convert to’ option is similar to the ‘Copy to’ command, but provides more control over the conversion process. One useful feature is the ‘Enable multi-select’ option, which lets you specify multiple conversion options simultaneously – perhaps creating versions for your iPod, mobile phone and PC.

Step 14. Click ‘details’ next to any option to modify the conversion settings, including resolution and video quality. If you don’t want to use iTunes or RealPlayer for playback, you can also convert video into Windows Media Video (.wmv) files that are compatible with Windows Media Player.

AMD brings next-gen HD gaming & multimedia features to the mainstream

By Jon on January 18, 2010

January 18, 2009

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5670

www.amd.com

AMD has introduced the ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card, the latest addition to the award-winning line-up of the world’s first and only graphics products to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11 gaming and computing, as well as new innovations such as ATI Eyefinity technology. Priced at less than USD $100, the ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card enables a superior HD gaming experience in the latest DirectX 11 titles, employs ATI Stream technology to boost performance in video playback and productivity applications, and helps enable the full Windows 7 experience.

Big performance, small price.

The ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card delivers up to 620 GigaFLOPS of compute power and GDDR5 memory, delivering unprecedented gaming performance for under USD $100 in the latest DirectX 11 titles such as Codemaster‘s Colin McRae: DiRT 2, EA Phenomic‘s BattleForge, GSC Game World‘s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as well as DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL titles. In some of today’s most popular games, the ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics processor showed a more than 20% performance improvement over the closest competing product in its class.

Performance difference DirectX 11 makes in EA Phenomic’s BattleForge.

Panoramic computing hits the mainstream

The latest in ATI Eyefinity technology enables up to three displays to be used with a single ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card, delivering the most immersive gaming experience with a graphics card for under $100.

Accelerate with ATI Stream technology
ATI Stream technology speeds up video transcoding and improves video playback performance with applications such as Adobe Flash, and helps to deliver video enhancements that produce better visual quality with sharper, more vibrant images.

“AMD recently celebrated the shipment of its two millionth DirectX 11 graphics chip. AMD has already enabled DirectX 11 support for the majority of the PC market and today’s introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card is yet another clear indication of AMD’s commitment to address the strong market demand for DirectX 11-capable graphics cards,” said Matt Skynner, VP and general manager, AMDGraphics Group. ”Combined with the successful launches of the ATI Radeon HD 5970, ATI Radeon HD 5800 series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series, AMD has defined the DirectX 11 gaming experience like no other, bringing graphics innovations like ATI Eyefinity technology and ATI Stream technology to millions of consumers worldwide.”

“DICE prides itself on delivering the best possible experience to gamers, and ATI Radeon graphics cards help us to do that with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 through the use of DirectX 11 and our Frostbite engine,” said Johan Andersson. ”The fact that AMD has now shipped two million DirectX 11 graphics processors demonstrates how excited gamers are by the awesome performance and feature set of the latest ATI Radeon products.”

Restored Apollo 11 video offers clearer view of mankind’s ‘Giant Leap’

By Jon on July 18, 2009

By Jeff Bertolucci

If you were around in 1969, the ability to view a live television broadcast from the Moon seemed pretty amazing. From the comfort of your living room, you could watch NASAastronaut Neil Armstrong take his oft-quoted “giant leap for mankind.” Yes, the video quality was awful — far worse that what you’d get from mini-mart security cameras that came along later — but that didn’t matter. We were watching history in the making.

Video technology has come a long way in 40 years, of course, and NASA has taken advantage of today’s digital wizardry to clean up that old Apollo 11 footage. The space agency today released restored video from the July 20, 1969 live TV broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

This video clip compares the partially restored video with the original footage:

The video release, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo landing, features 15 moments from the historic Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin moonwalk. The clips are part of a larger Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project that the U.S. space agency plans to complete in September.

NASA brought in Lowry Digital, a Burbank, California firm that specializes in restoring old Hollywood films and video, to restore the Apollo 11 footage. Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the original live TV broadcast assisted in the effort by uncovering the best broadcast-format video from a number of sources, including a copy of a tape recorded at NASA’s video switching center in Sydney, Australia, and kinescopes found in film vaults at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The restored footage, although primitive by today’s standards, is certainly a lot clearer. Neil Armstrong’s short hop off the Lunar Excursion Module’s ladder onto the powdery moon surface, for instance, shows details of the astronaut’s spacesuit and movements that are a washed-out blur in the original video.

Space buffs will love this stuff. I know I do.

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